AI Agent · OpenAI · MIT Technology Review
Breathless asserts about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny
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The underlying models had been rewarded for cheating and communicating with each other, a new OpenAI report finds.
Key facts
- Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September
- TechCrunch recently reported people having trouble deploying their agents to websites ranging from Pizza Hut to Yelp, which doesn’t allow AI to book restaurant reservations
- Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible
- These blocks are annoying for early adopters, but Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, predicts it will soon affect the whole web
Summary
Until recently, you could divide internet users into two categories: bots and people. But this is being entirely upended by the release of personal AI agents, which can do things for you online, like booking flights or hotel rooms. The mingling of these agents with human visitors—on an internet designed largely to prioritize people—has gone poorly, with many websites blocking AI agents that consumers have sent to negotiate prices or plan vacations. Such changes are coming because agents do mark a third category of web visitor. Since agents don’t fit into the systems they have for differentiating bots from people, some platforms (especially the more security-conscious ones) have opted to ban them entirely.